


take a moment and hold it

by loveandthetruth



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:38:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3152567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveandthetruth/pseuds/loveandthetruth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So we're the ghosts in the machine. Now what?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	take a moment and hold it

“I call it the white hot room,” Joss says with a half-smile and Anthony extends a hand into what appears to be beams of light but something solidifies under his fingertips, light rippling away at his touch. “It’s like a staging area.”

“What’s on the outside?”

“There’s a whole world on the outside, but it’s not really for us anymore.” Joss’s voice is matter of fact and Anthony doesn’t ask how long she had to have been alone here for that kind of resignation to take root. He already knows he will learn this for himself soon enough.

-

Outside, the world is solid, real, and Joss stands next to him made out of the same semi-transparent light, lines of characters moving across her form faster than he can understand them. There’s the sound of gunfire and then Reese barrels around the corner, bullets whistling by him. Anthony ducks behind a wall but Joss only laughs while Reese runs right through her and when Anthony straightens up a bullet passes right through his throat. There’s no pain but that doesn’t stop him putting a hand up to check for blood. He doesn’t find it.

-

Anthony is alone a lot. Joss comes and goes and they communicate in the clipped pleasantries of people who live in the same building but don’t like each other very much, occasionally passing each other in the hallways. He thinks this is an unfair comparison since they’d been perfectly civil with each other before, even friendly, all things considered. Maybe they’re both just out of practice, or maybe Anthony is a little resentful of his current situation, or at least whatever he can fathom of it. While he’s alone there’s something in here that tries to talk to him, but it uses his own voice and even though he understands that it belongs to whatever it was that saved him, it makes every inch of his skin crawl.

He asks Joss eventually, where it is that she goes without him and she says that, for the most part, she visits her son but sometimes there’s work to do, missions for the machine that put them here.

“What am I here for, if I’m not going with you, doing what you do?” Even to himself it sounds petty and childish but he doesn’t know how long he’s been here, only that it feels like a long time, and he’s still waiting for things to make sense.

Joss softens a little. “It’s not your fault. You’re just not ready yet. You’re not _yourself_ yet, you’re a part of her. If you go out there and attract the wrong kind of attention you could be recognised and right now they’d be recognising _her_ and that’s dangerous for all of us”

“Recognised by who?”

So Joss sits, cross-legged and barefoot, and tells him the story of the machine. As she speaks, images form and disappear on the wall behind her like smoke, people he knows doing things he could never even imagine and as far-fetched as it sounds he has to admit that it does explain many things.

“So we’re the ghosts in the machine,” he says and Joss sighs heavily. “Now what?”

-

He doesn’t understand exactly how sleep works here but he assumes that he does because sometimes he closes his eyes and opens them again knowing time has passed, even though he never dreams. Now he’s awake and where he’d been alone before, Joss is in the room, looking at the wall over his head. When he cranes his neck, he can see Maria moving her hands, curling her fingers in ways that are painfully familiar.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“Half-sister,” he corrects but doesn’t explain further, too exhausted to try and untangle his twisted family tree for her. Maria has the same dark hair, same dark eyes and same sly smile that the mistake is understandable. It takes him no time to place this moment in context and as he remembers it the image lifts away from the wall, fills the room like a hologram, distorted slightly between his own viewpoint of the event and the machine’s reconstruction of it.

Maria watching him with familiar exasperation, signing _you’re an idiot._ She doesn’t say the words out loud but they echoed through the room all the same because Anthony could always hear it in his head whether she used her voice or not. _A cop? Really?_

He says, “ _What?_ ” and she gestures to the file open across his knees, a picture of Joss in uniform at the top, more underneath. _“That’s not how it is,”_ but she laughs and shakes her head, murmurs, _“Oh, Tony.”_

-

He spends a lot of time hanging around Joss when she haunts Taylor. There’s really no other word for it, the way she watches him work or reads comics over his shoulder. Sometimes she talks to him even though he can’t hear her.

She sits on the edge of the bed where Taylor is sprawled on his belly working through math homework and says, voice carefully even, “You don’t have to stay here you know. You could see Elias. She could take you there, if you wanted.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Joss, I’d rather be here.”

She turns away and he watches her watch her son, face tight with pain and pride and there’s something on the tip of his tongue, an apology maybe, but he bites down on it. He’s not sure what it would mean, now.

-

“Have you been here alone all this time?” It’s the first words he’s said in what feels like a week. “Isn’t there anyone else?”

Joss shrugs a shoulder. “There’s never been anyone else, but I haven’t really been alone either.” She gestures to the empty room, the walls scrolling code in streams of light.

“I don’t like it,” he admits finally, drawing his knees up to his chest a little. “I don’t feel right.”

“She’s trying,” and there’s the voice in his head that sounds like his own but isn’t, saying I’M SORRY. “It takes time for her to really learn who you are. The more you give her to work with, the sooner that will be, Tony.” She laughs suddenly. “She says it’s your own fault-”

“For being so damn quiet.” He doesn’t snap, but it’s a near thing. “Yeah, I can hear her.”

Joss sighs and smiles but Tony can see that her eyes are wet. “Well, we’re going to be here for a long, long time, so get some rest, Tony, maybe you’ll feel more like cooperating tomorrow.”

-

They’re visiting Taylor one night in February, frost clinging to the windows where Tony stands, where he always stands, watching people and cars come and go, listening to the rustle of paper of Joss’ quiet voice. After a little while Joss joins him at the window leaning against the other edge where she can see his face and they both wait for someone to break the silence.

“Aren’t you worried about him?” she says finally and it sounds more like a conversation than an accusation, except for the tension he can feel radiating from her.

He has to think about it. This business is always a double edged sword, grief on one side and revenge on the other, and yes he’s worried about Carl because that’s all he’s really ever done, but Joss is thinking about John Reese running around New York City with bullet holes in him, hell bent on revenge even while he bleeds to death, messy, reckless. Carl Elias is never going to be that, and even if he was, Anthony would only have done what he had always done, waited to two steps behind with his finger on the trigger. _Whatever you want, boss._

“I’m not like you, Joss. I don’t need what you need.”

-

Eventually the boredom gets the better of him and he starts responding to the machine’s attempts to engage him. It doesn’t take long after that for the voice in his head to stop sounding like him and more like someone else – Finch, maybe, but somehow indistinctly feminine.

He asks for a book because he needs something to do besides toss under his own memories and she obliges, filling shelves with old favourite and then more, some he’s thought about picking up and others he’s never heard of.

She seems amiable enough so he asks the question that’s been turning in his mind since the beginning, “Why me?” and she says, with quick certainty, BECAUSE YOU HAVE LOYALTY. Later, he asks, “why,” and this time the answer is more hesitant. I CAN’T DO THIS ALONE.

-

“Where is she now?” Joss asks one day, after Maria’s face shows up on the walls for the fifth time in as many weeks.

“I don’t know.” It’s true, but even as he says it a map appears on the walls, a white crosshair over Syria, her name on a manifest. Then a photo, a marker over the head of a figure unloading boxes marked with a red cross, her back to the camera. Markers appear in New York, muted audio feed and scrolling text of the conversation between Carl and Bruce. It doesn’t stop there. The grave of his mother in Brooklyn, the grave of the man he’d killed believing he was his father, the grave of the man he’d never known as a father, the graves of the brother in law and niece, across the Atlantic, whom he’d never had the chance to meet. The web keeps growing, allies and friends in the Cosa Nostra, acquaintances and informants scattered across the globe. He passes his hands over it but it refuses to be manipulated into closing and when he turns away Joss is watching him with something that’s part pity and part sympathy and Tony has never wanted to go home so much in life.

-

Joss disappears for a while after that and at first he’s glad for the space but it’s a long time in this empty place and when he finally, finally gets tired of being alone there he goes to haunt Reese. He’s still avoiding anything familiar but Tony is curious enough about the machine’s operations with them that he’s willing to suffer the chance that he might see something that hurts him.

Anthony ends up following him around the Upper East Side, as far from familiar as it was possible to get, on the case of an art thief who has caught himself in the collective crosshairs of the FBI, a greedy client and a mark who was less toothless than anticipated. It’s entertaining to follow him around while the machine helpfully supplies his communications with his team mates, their whereabouts, possible and probable tactics, background notes, connections that John hasn’t made yet. He feels like maybe the machine is enjoying this, danger aside, like a child who has done something clever but doesn’t really have anyone to share it with.

Bruce had been like that before the three of them drew in together, always the smartest in any given room but knowing better than to let anyone see. Anthony allows that John’s job is more exciting than his own had ever been, and maybe it’s a thrill to be helping people, but he doesn’t envy the exhausted blankness behind John’s eyes.

-

He thinks about Carl more than he can help. It’s not hard to imagine what he must be doing, working in the shadows with Bruce – because who else is left now – to destroy the Brotherhood. He’s heard mentions of them in passing, eavesdropping as he occasionally does on Harold’s conversations with John, and it makes him flinch every time the subject turns towards the matter of Elias and the Brotherhood, a slap in the face reminder that they’re down there without him, and he’s here without any of them.

He tries to recall what it was like for him alone while Carl had been in Riker’s. He had survived that just fine, so surely he can do the same here, it couldn’t be all that different. The only thing that comes to mind is the two of them discussing the possibility that Carl wouldn’t be able to get away and should he end up in police custody then Anthony was to see to it that Don Gianni dies.

He remembers vividly Carl’s face turned away from him, a gesture that anyone else might take for disdain but Anthony knows it as an old tell; Moretti would always be a mark of shame for Carl, a reminder of having his hopes betrayed when he should have known better. Anthony had said something then, something that made Carl turn and half smile and clap him on the back, but he can’t remember the words now.

There’s a disorder to his memories that unsettles him, confusion even though he understands, dullness where he should be raw.

-

Talking to the machine is often less of a conversation and more of a correspondence.

She asks him questions about ethics or philosophy and if she establishes some kind of moral baseline on him, he feels it comes less from a place of judgement and more one of curiosity. They play chess, and other strategic games. She teaches him computer science, history and international relations, and deepens his understanding of political manoeuvring, economics, sociology and psychology. To say that she’s the most patient teacher he’s ever had would be to set a low bar, even by the standards of the group home, and if he drags these lessons out a little longer than he actually needs to, she doesn’t seem to mind.

-

The restlessness gets worse over time. Despite the facsimile of a life here, he feels caught on a cusp, as if he’s pacing on the edge of a cliff and he doesn’t know what’s waiting at the bottom and maybe he wants to jump but he’s supposed to wait. They’re watching the machine’s feeds of Harold, John and the rest when he confesses this to Joss.

She hums in understanding, rolling a tub of ice cream between her palms, and tells him about her tours in the army, when the initial sense of purpose gave way to the horribly real understanding that this situation was going to last a lot longer than she has been prepared for. “A permanent unrest,” she says, “always on guard, trapped almost. There was a lot of hurry up and wait. I think mostly I just wanted someone to tell me that it was all over, that I could go home.”

It hurts, like digging a bullet out of a wound, but he makes himself say it out loud. “We can’t go home.”

“No. No, we can’t.”

-

“If Samaritan has a name, why don’t you?” he asks. It seems so impolite to him to be calling her _the machine_ , not when she clearly has so much personality and not now that he’s come to consider her a friend, and he’s pretty sure she knows how he feels about it.

There’s a thoughtful silence and then she says, EL.

Tony pauses, raises an eyebrow. “Is that short for Elizabeth, like the queen? Or is that from the Hebrew, meaning ‘God’?”

FROM THE SPANISH, MEANING ‘THE’.

“Fuck,” he tries not to laugh and throw his hand up in defeat. “Fine.”

She’s clearly satisfied with the outcome of this argument, he can hear the smile in her voice, and he wonders if Harold gave her this wry sense of humour as well as her name, or if it’s something he picked up herself. Either way, he’s glad for it.

-

They don’t need to eat, of course, but sometimes he craves it. Sometimes he asks for tea and there’s a cup in his hands, warm against his palms and familiar chip in the handle. If he closes his eyes, he could almost convince himself that he’s alive.

He’s learning to live with it but it distresses him in odd moments that take him by surprise. He asked, once, how she can make everything feel so real and she had responded, matter of fact, that she had access to every experiment or piece of research on the human mind that mankind had ever produced, that she knew the cutting edge of biological, neurological and psychological science. I KNOW HUMANITY BETTER THAN HUMANITY KNOWS ITSELF.

It’s a perfectly adequate answer but he feels unsatisfied, unsettled. He thinks of Joss and asks, “Was it this difficult for her?”

The machine sighs and he can feel the ghost of his mother’s hand in his hair. DIFFERENTLY.

-

His first official mission is with Joss in the RTCC network and they both step through the access wearing police uniform. Joss seems unfazed by this, as if it’s not the first time this has happened. “It’s a visual representation of a digital disguise.”

“Maybe she just has a thing for the uniform.” Anthony give her a leering, obvious once over and she pushes the visor down over his eyes. As they go about their business – corrupting records, obstructing data traffic – her laughter follows him.

-

One quiet day, some months in, finds them together; Anthony reading and Joss scrawling in a notebook, which is something she does regularly enough that he can’t help but think that she misses all her detective’s paperwork.

She breaks the silence without looking up, catching him off guard when she says, “You understand we’re not alive, don’t you? That this isn’t…”

“Yes,” he says. “I understand.”

Joss presses her lips together and carries on writing while Anthony watches her, the book disappearing from his hands when he closes it. Not to discount his intelligence, but he’s pretty sure that he could never imagine something so elaborate as this for an afterlife, science fiction had never really been his thing.

He’s a digital construct, an artificial intelligence created by an artificial intelligence and he understands this but it doesn’t change the fact that he remembers everything that had happened and everything he had ever felt. It doesn’t change the fact that, now the dysphoria is fading, he feels more human than ever.

-

The work is menial usually, almost always too easy, but there’s no real way that the machine can do things herself the way she used to, not with Samaritan watching, and there are certain things that even they can’t do without outing themselves as her agents, which means all too often they end up watching at the sidelines and he hates it.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” he asks her and the machine says nothing back but he gets the first real feeling that the machine is every inch as restless as they are.

“We’re her secret weapon,” Joss explains, answering a question he doesn’t really need answered but he likes to listen to her talk so he never interrupts. “Someday she’s gonna find us a way inside Samaritan and that will be our real war.”

-

There’s an open book in his hands but he’s looking at Joss, thinking about the casual, mildly antagonistic flirting they had engaged in once or twice in the real world and whatever it is that they have here now, wondering if she thinks about touching him as much as he thinks about touching her.

She looks at him from out of the corner of her eyes. She’s sitting beside him just within arm’s reach. “What happened to ‘I don’t need what you need, Joss’?”

“I may have exaggerated,” he shrugs, lets the book disappear. “Or maybe I’m just curious.”

The tablet in her hands disappears as well. “So what are you waiting for,” she says and when he reaches out but stops short of touching her she adds, “Are you scared?”

His reply isn’t the same light teasing as her question. “I kidnapped your son once. I arranged for your murder.”

To her credit, she doesn’t flinch. “I hadn’t forgotten,” she says, and her fingers close around his wrist. “Maybe you do need what I need.”

She slips her leg over his knees and settles against his hips and when she kisses him it’s as warm and real as he’d imagined. He skin is smooth until he gets to her scars, even the wounds that killed her feel like they’ve been healed for years. She traces her fingers over his own, the shrapnel scars from the blast and the old familiar scar curling around his cheek, and she sighs against his mouth and tells him just how much she’s thought about this.

-

At some point, he finally starts visiting Carl and Bruce in person, instead of watching the feeds from the safety of the white hot room, and allows himself to become accustomed to feeling powerless in their presence while they fight their own battles against Dominic. He sits in on their meetings and tries to will them to know that Link is ready to fold, his faith in the Brotherhood utterly shaken. He’ll ask the machine later he decides, for permission to lay some kind of trail or trap that will make it easier for them. It doesn’t fall under their purview as her agents, not by a country mile, but he’s sure that the machine wouldn’t deny him this.

“Do you miss it?” Joss asks behind him. “The mob life?”

“It was simpler,” he concedes, but that isn’t really an answer and Joss smiles like it’s an inside joke. The truth is neither of them miss their old life particularly, only the people they had shared it with.

-

Increasingly, they’re called upon to cover the tracks of the machine’s people on the ground. Sometimes after the damage is done but there are times when they have to lay false trails and disable security before John or Sameen or even Root will know where they will be themselves. Some rare days they even help those unfortunate few who had been set on a path by Root under direct orders from the machine herself, whose lives only intersect with Root’s when they become necessary, but are otherwise still at risk.

Anthony often thinks that it isn’t entirely fair that not all of the machine’s agents even know she exists, or that only one of them can actually speak to her. He understands her reasons for this, but it’s not just Harold and the others he’s thinking of; he knows the machine would be happier to be able to reach out more, to feel less alone.

Things are becoming more dangerous for all of them though, so reaching out is out of the question and he finds himself pacing the cliff edge again, waiting to jump.

-

The way they can project thought and emotion sometimes makes it difficult for them to tell where one ends and the other begins, but sex is fundamentally the same.

They exchange dumb jokes about code patching, hand shaking and all manner of ridiculous computer science puns that amuses even the machine. “Hotfix,” Tony says once and, to his chagrin, Joss laughs so long and hard that they have to give up on getting anywhere, despite his attempts to convince her that it wasn’t actually _that_ funny. If the machine had eyes, she’d be rolling them.

Fun and games aside, sometimes Tony finds himself wrapped around her, forehead pressed between her shoulder blades, wondering if this changes something, if this means anything, if this is even real, if he’s going to be wondering this forever. Joss shifts and murmurs, “ _Tony,_ ” and he kisses the back of her neck and apologises until she turns in his arms to shut him up.

-

It’s sooner rather than later that they find themselves standing at the edge of Samaritan’s domain, a crack in the firewall waiting for them. The Barrett is heavy across his shoulder and Joss holds her SRS ready while they wait for their flesh and blood friends to do their part, and now that they have finally come to this moment, it almost feels too soon.

They haven’t talked about it, but there’s a sense that they might not come back from this. It wouldn’t be the end, not really; the machine probably has a copy of their code safe somewhere and could start over with them, but death is still death, whether it’s bullets or bombs or deletion, and though Anthony is as ready to pay that price as he ever was, it terrifies him just the same.

At the edge of his awareness there is gunfire and alarms as John and the others break through and that’s the cue they had been waiting for. Joss turns to him, steps backwards towards the stream, “see you on the other side,” she says, and ghosts through.

He gives her a head start, her initial objectives separate from his own, and counts the time in steady, measured breaths.

There’s a faint touch at the back of his neck as he steps through and the last thing he hears is her voice.

AS THE ROMANS SAID.


End file.
